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Utinahica Dig Update

Greatings All, Well, I am finally back home again as of last night. The Dig was a big sucess, though not a complete one. We found more evidence of very early Spanish, but we no longer think the building we were escavating was "THE" Spanish Mission we thought it might be. Instead it seems to be a Ceremonial Building. I am limited to how much I can say online about everything we found until FernBank has a chance to do so but I can offer up this article that appeared in the Atlanta Journal on Tuesday. Take warning though that the writer MUST be a frustrated author (LOL). I Laughed when I read it, but he does have the basic facts right. I included a Slide show with a number of Pics from the Dig. Also, in my latest stash are a number of Pics showing the general types of artifacts we were finding.

Fernbank digs into early Georgian history

By MARK DAVIS The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 12/11/07

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JACKSONVILLE, Ga. — Jacksonville, Ga. -- Was it a fight, all those centuries ago? Looking at the dirt, you can't help but wonder. The clay fragments form an arc, as if someone swept a pot off the shelf and watched it shatter. A bead turns up in the same area as last month. This time, diggers also find a pitted sliver of iron -- a weapon, maybe? It's not scientific to conjecture, but it's so human. Did someone smash the pot and yank the bead from his enemy's neck? Who wielded the iron? And who torched the house? The questions come more readily than the answers in the woods of Telfair County, where archaeologists working with the Fernbank Museum of Natural History are shoveling into the past. They are learning more about a pivotal moment in North American history, when two cultures came together under a canopy of longleaf pines not far from the Ocmulgee River. Evidence indicates that they did not meet peacefully, says Fernbank archaeologist Dennis Blanton. On a recent December afternoon, he and a handful of other specialists painstakingly remove the slice of iron discovered earlier that morning. For the past two years, the tract has surrendered pottery shards, six beads and two pieces of iron artifacts that came from Spaniards, visitors to the continent half a millennium ago. Fernbank employees recently showcased some of their earlier findings, which help illuminate a murky period of this continent's history. 'Interesting, isn't it?' Blanton asks, holding the iron to the light. It looks like an elongated diamond 6 inches long, ending in points. 'An object of destruction, carried a long time ago,' he continues. 'These Spaniards didn't know what to expect. They were armed to the teeth, and this is proof of it.' Or, if not proof, a tantalizing hint that something historic may have happened here, centuries earlier. A find, a mystery The site is hidden, a small spot in the middle of nearly 2,000 acres. The Ocmulgee River, brown and restless, is about a mile away. Crows sound harsh cries in the December air. Red oaks, festooned with Spanish moss, offer them a good view to the activity below. The activity has gone on intermittently since summer 2005, when Blanton, Fernbanks' curator of Native American archaeology, laid out the dig area. He expected to find evidence of the 17th-century Spanish mission Santa Isabel de Utinahica, an outpost on the fringes of a fledgling empire. Instead, he and others discovered a glass bead that was older than anything they expected to unearth. Blanton recognized it with one glance -- a piece of glass fired 500 years ago in the furnaces of Murano, an island close to Venice, Italy. When Spaniards headed toward the New World centuries ago, they brought the handiwork of Murano with them. Their galleons also held iron, suitable for shovels, knives and weapons. Since that discovery two years ago, Blanton and others have carefully sliced away at the foundations of what once was a building. They use shovels whose points have been filed to more readily scoop up Telfair County soil, loam the color of caramel. They rely on trowels to finesse dirt away from pot fragments and discarded chunks of clay that once helped fashion the building's walls. Paintbrushes are for the really fine, close work. It's hard, agrees Eugene Chapman, an archaeologist from Merritt Island, Fla., who is working for a few weeks on the site. It's also fascinating. "The chance to work on a job like this?" he asks, eyes bright under a awning-sized hat brim. "This is one amazing thing." The dig may be one of the most significant of the year, says volunteer Doug Tarver. A retired educator, he has been helping at the site since the first the first shovel broke ground here two years ago. He considers his work passion in action. "It' the love of archaeology," Tarver says, tossing aside a shovelful of dirt that had been screened for artifacts. "And it's learning about the past." But what past? The bead, Blanton and others know, could have come from a doomed 1526 settlement started by Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a sugar planter who dreamed of starting a new civilization in the New World. Did one de Ayllon's followers drop the bead in the vast wilderness? Or did it come from Hernando de Soto, who came ashore at La Florida in 1540? He and about 1,000 others headed north into the swamp and scrub of the continent, the beginning of a three-year trek whose exact path is still disputed. Did someone in the de Soto party leave a bead on his tramp into the heart of a new land? Blanton is the first to admit that he may never unearth a definitive answer, but that's OK. The artifacts, he's convinced, showcase a watershed. "These objects represent a changed world," Blanton says. "They mark the moment when everything turned around." Rachel Vykukal finds it. She is on her knees, scraping the soil with a trowel, when the sun catches something dazzling. "I saw a flash of blue," recalls, Vykukal, of Spartanburg. She leans over to Blanton, digging nearby. Vykukal is afraid to speak. "Dennis!" she whispers. "I just got a bead!" The bead. Even dirty, it glows in the December sun. Everyone stops to admire it, then return to their labors with renewed hope. What else is in the soil? The next morning, they find out. Chad Horton of Columbia is prying at the dirt with a trowl when the point turns up some reddish soil -- rusted iron, they discover. And another treasure, the diamond-shaped chunk of metal that had to have come from Europe. That night, sitting in a hotel room, the archaeologists celebrate their finds in the traditional way. They drink Andre champagne from paper cups and re-live the moments when Telfair County surrendered another mystery. Blanton, as lead archaeologist, offers a scientific observation: "This," he says, "was a very, very sexy, cool find." And the dig isn't over. Telfair's soil may yet hold more treasures.

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